To pay or not to play: Athletic fees a growing trend around SouthCoast

Sunday

Sep 30, 2007 at 12:30 AM

The Brandso boys grew up on an island named for their family: population 15. Their entire hometown of Roan, Norway, was hardly a bustling metropolis: population 1,100.

MIKE ROCHA

The Brandso boys grew up on an island named for their family: population 15. Their entire hometown of Roan, Norway, was hardly a bustling metropolis: population 1,100.

Playing sports and participating in other extracurricular activities was never easy. So the family sacrificed togetherness for better opportunities, coming to Dartmouth, Mom's hometown.

Morgan and Sondre no longer have six-hour drives for soccer practice or music lessons. And now Grunde can play football, the game the biggest of five brothers is more suited to.

Still there are challenges. Now the obstacles aren't long drives. The hurdles in Dartmouth are monetary, specifically the athletic fees, busing fees, activity fees and parking fees that every student has to pay to help offset the town's multimillion-dollar budget deficit after a Proposition 2½ tax override was rejected by voters in July.

"I do think it's a problem," said the children's mother, Darleen Berg. "I don't think it's a good way of bringing in revenue.

"I think it's a community's responsibility to give children an equal opportunity to be productive adults and the same opportunity (that previous generations had)."

Berg will have to pay more than $1,000 for the 2007-08 school year between the $500 per family cap in athletic fees and the busing fee to get her kids to and from school, also capped at $500 per family and the $50 per semester activity fee.

She brought Morgan, a junior midfielder who one day hopes to play professionally in Europe, to her hometown three years ago. Sondre, also a varsity soccer player, followed in 2006 and Grunde came this summer. Ole Kristian Brandso, the boys' father, stayed in Roan with the families' two youngest sons.

"Having (user fees) puts a price tag on what forms productive adults. I'd rather pay more (in taxes) and have a good, strong community," Berg said. "Maybe the people (who voted against the override) have lost their community spirit. When you take care of everyone, we all win."

Dartmouth's not alone in its monetary plight. It's the fourth of nine SouthCoast school systems, with Westport, Old Rochester Regional and Wareham, to join the more than 170 systems in Massachusetts that charge athletic fees. Fairhaven avoided them only because of a significant fund-raising effort after a Proposition 2½ override failed before the 2005-06 school year.

User fees also bring up a number of concerns for the people paying them. Where is the money going exactly? What if I can't afford to pay the fee? Does the fee guarantee playing time? And for coaches, am I going to have fewer people participating?

"The kids that play now are the diehards that are in love with their sport," said Katelyn Soares, a Dartmouth High senior, who plays softball in the spring. She said she wouldn't go out for another sport because of the cost. "I don't think people are going to pay to play for fun."

Without help from the community, fees aren't going away.

"They're the lesser of two evils," said Richard Neal, executive director of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association. "When (athletic fees) were introduced a couple of decades ago, I had a number of concerns. One being that the fees would drive young people away, but while they're not a good phenomenon, it's better than the alternative. A rather large number of communities have instituted user fees. "¦ It's the only way they can afford the programs.

"State education spending is not keeping up with the financial needs of communities. So I don't think user fees are going away in the foreseeable future."

Canton has the largest fees of any system in the state at $495 per sport with a $1,980 cap per family, according to superednet.com, a Web site run by Hingham resident Dick Hawkins, to monitor education spending in the state.

"There are some fees that are extraordinary," Neal said. "I continue to be surprised."

Westport and Old Rochester are the area's most costly at $150 per sport. However, Old Rochester limits the amount a family can spend at $550, while Westport does not have a cap. Both Dartmouth and Old Rochester use the fees to cover the cost of equipment, officials and transportation between contests. Wareham, which charges a fee of $60 per sport, uses the fee to cover only the cost of transportation.

Westport uses the fee to cover the athletic department's entire budget shortfall, but still falls short. Athletic Director Gail Sylvia was saddled with a $900 bill from the bus company that transported the school's baseball team on its unplanned run deep into the MIAA tournament.

"Some people think there's a money tree behind Westport High School," Sylvia said. "If there is one, I'd like to know where it is."

When Dartmouth parents paid their fall athletic fees at an information meeting on Sept. 20, concerns were raised that athletic fees would be used to supplement more than just athletics in the town's $2 million deficit. The following afternoon a letter went home with fall athletes that stated, "Funds collected (from fees) will be placed back into the athletic program to offset a portion of the costs associated with running the program. Costs such as league fees, replacement equipment, training supplies, etc.

"... There will be no balance of funds remaining. If we were to institute fees to cover the full costs of our athletic programs, we would need to triple, and in some cases, quadruple the fees charged. The balance of funds used to support these programs is being taken from school appropriations and the general school budget."

Soares, the Dartmouth senior who only plays softball, didn't get the letter. And she said rumors are running through the school that the money wasn't going only to sports.

Schools, as required by equal-opportunity laws, have put measures in place for students who cannot afford to pay the fee, but some are too proud to ask, said Wareham Athletic Director Buddy Carlson. And he isn't going to muscle a student into paying the fee.

"We're technically losing money (when we waive one kid's athletic fee), what's another few (dollars)?" Carlson said. "Being in education for 35 years, I know the value of athletics, what it means to their social development. I'm not going to deprive a kid out of that, based on a few dollars and I don't think anybody would."

In Wareham, the school's DECA program — a business-marketing club — developed an initiative to offset the athletic fees for the softball team by selling advertising on the fence of the team's home field. While the program is not yet in place for this spring, DECA supervisor Cindy Sylvia hopes to have a proposal that would raise $4,800 on the principal's desk by Thanksgiving.

"A lot of kids take care of their own user fees," said Sylvia, also Dartmouth's softball coach. "So you've got to allow kids to go out and work on the weekends," which cuts down on practice time. "With all the hours of athletics, study and to go to work, that's a lot to put on their docket."

In Fairhaven, when a Proposition 2½ override failed in 2005, the athletic department had to make up a $75,000 shortfall. But instead of user fees, Fairhaven was able to make up the deficit through the All Sports Booster Club, an anonymous donation of $7,000 and through a contribution from the Matty Oliveira fund.

"It was an amazing thing," Fairhaven Superintendent of Schools Robert Baldwin said. "At the first meeting after the override failed, there was a lot of emotion and finger pointing. But the support groups came along and we started the 'getting to zero initiative.'"

The school would have charged user fees to make up the balance, but the fund-raisers worked and the school never had to charge fees.

"Fees create issues that were never there before you had to pay," Dr. Baldwin said. "We stand a chance of alienating those who can't afford to pay. Studies have shown that enrollment goes down. We believe, like all schools do, that what goes on from 2-5 p.m. is just as important as what goes on from 7-2."

In Michigan, the only state where the high school athletic association ran a survey to determine the effect of user fees, it was found that participation, in fact, goes up. Of schools that charge fees, 87.4 percent reported no decline in participation. Of the 118 schools that charge fees, just four saw students transfer out of the district to avoid the fees. Like in Massachusetts, where participation in athletics set records for four straight years before leveling out this season, Michigan has also set records in participation.

Dartmouth hasn't seen a drop in participation yet, but athletic director Tom McDermott wants to see if the trend continues.

"Looking at the numbers compared to the last three to five years, they're very similar," said McDermott, who's in charge of 374 athletes this fall. "Football is at 120, that's been the average. Boys and girls soccer is around 60, or 20 per team. Golf, that gets cut to 11 or 12, field hockey is about the same. So they're very similar to what they've been. We're curious to see how that continues."

Cross country coach Jeff Reed has a veteran-laden team of more than 40 boys and girls and doesn't expect to see a difference until winter track, a more socially active sport.

"The question this season is: Are we going to have 100-plus kids sign up when they know it's $100 and they just want to do it to be part of a team and be with their friends?" Reed said. "There's a lot out there that ... kind of like to run but they're more there for the social aspect. I think we'll lose a lot of those kids."

Dartmouth had toyed with a number of alternatives to user fees, including cutting all schedules by 20 percent or canceling all freshman sports, but McDermott felt depriving one group of students the right to participate was even less appealing.

"The thought was we could do it, but that's going to impact the kids the most," he said. "It makes more sense to charge a fee and those that can afford it will pay it. Once you cut something it's very, very difficult to get it back."

Schools cannot deny a student access, but paying the fees doesn't necessarily guarantee playing time. Some coaches feel, on the varsity level, playing time is purely a merit-based equation, while playing time at the junior varsity and freshman level should be equally distributed.

"The reality is sport is clearly about competition," Neal, the MIAA director, said, "and playing time goes to those who can contribute. At the premier level, one of the objectives is victory, but it's not the only objective."

McDermott knows that charging fees is not the best way to go and he's leery of the day, if it comes, when the athletic program is funded solely on fees.

"What we need, we will get," he said. "Athletics are getting everything we need. If you get to the point where you're totally dependent on fees to run your program, than it's going to bite you in the end."